


Secret-Keeper

by tradescant (tofty)



Series: Fidelius [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-04-04
Updated: 2003-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:36:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/tradescant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Severus Snape is kind of tense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secret-Keeper

Severus Snape is not a man who forgets he's been dreaming as soon as he opens his eyes. They are just that now, dreams and not summonses or punishments or even visions of the hell surely waiting for him, in one form or another. But he wakes over and over in the night just the same, sweaty, teeth clenched and grinding and muscles so tight he can't move to reach for his wand, for light and security. A stiffened corpse, embalmed by the fear and fury in his veins, and he can lie in the dark for hours before he feels the blood flowing again. Eventually it will reach his arms and legs and he will be able to move, he knows this as the rational man he knows himself to be, but each time he opens his eyes to the oppressive dungeon blackness, no matter how many times it happens, no matter for how long it will continue to happen, he stares blindly out into the world, and feels as though the night will never end. He waits for it to happen again, and again, until it's finally time to start his day.

Then, though, there's the rest of the day to get through, and Snape, wound tight before he gets out of bed, just winds himself tighter during its course. He stares at his sagging, poisoned-looking face in the mirror as he casts the shaving charm, and his reflection's never been a friendly or even particularly welcome sight, but these days it's a map of enemy territory, contours moulded by conflict, ravaged, stripped bare of resources, left dead and desert-dry, as unwelcoming and unwelcome as the faces of his colleagues and students over the breakfast table.

All his days to get through, all the same. The same announcements and speeches from Minerva that he used to hear from Dumbledore. The same meals, prepared in the same ways, served on dishes he can hardly bear to look at without wanting to smash them, and as a matter of fact, the house-elves have taken to bringing him the crockery mugs the students use, since he's broken too many of the proper china cups reserved for the faculty, and too often crushed them beyond magical repair. The same hopelessly inept classes to teach, each form's faces so similar to other faces in other years that he can hardly tell them apart though he knows they do change, are moving on, are outgrowing Hogwarts and him and the dead-end life he's got tattooed on his inner arm, are preparing for life after school with a such a universally boundless sense of entitlement that he considers undermining it through regular humiliation to be an actual duty (and also a talent he enjoys displaying, as well as one of his chiefest pleasures). The same unproductive meetings with the same incompetent bureaucrats, determined to win their point no matter the cost. The same asinine, twittering portraits and passwords. The same nightly rounds, the same illicitly intertwined students in closets. The same cauldrons to stir every night, different potions but the same rituals and bindings and experiments, the satisfyingly concrete results another minute daily pleasure before he leaves off to button his nightshirt and his tension tightly at the throat. The same, every day, every day, and if he doesn't do these things, in exactly this way, if he doesn't go to sleep at night flat on his back with every muscle locked, if he hasn't accomplished even one of these things, he's convinced that the darkness burned under his skin and metastasized into his magic will consume him again, this time irrevocably, fatally.

Minerva knows this because Dumbledore knew, and thinks to funnel his violent guilt into her cause, just as Dumbledore did. Black knows it, and thinks to do battle with it, all the time. Remus Lupin knows it, and thinks to atone for his own perceived sins. Really, each member of the Order knows, on separate terms, and wants to use him or fight him, predictable as life.

And Harry Potter knows it too. But Potter just wants to touch Snape, or rather. He wants Snape to touch him.

:::

When he delivers Potter's letters and his assignments and his news, he also delivers something else, something for Potter to hold on to, literally. Potter tried to explain once, what it was like to be under Fidelius, all his senses muted to outside stimuli, but, Potter being Potter, doesn't have the words enough to do it, or else uses Muggle similes Snape understands only imperfectly (What in Merlin's name is cotton wool, boy?). Snape does know, in theory, that the magical barriers and wards created around Harry are physical ones, nearly unbreakable ones, and it makes sense to him that they manifest themselves strongly enough to hold Potter apart from anything as well as anyone, except the one they've been spelled to let in. Secret-Keeper, Snape. And the Potions Master in him, the orderly scientist, was fascinated enough right from the beginning to listen to the fumbling explanations in spite of his resentment at being coerced into the extra duty, the break in routine which like any other break could prove to the final one. Fascinated enough to ask follow-up questions, to perform experiments, to ask for demonstrations.

And then Potter was touching him all the time, just for the feel of something against his skin, always touching Snape, who has never liked to be casually touched and who finally tried to demonstrate what he considered to be the only kind of circumstances acceptable for invasion of his person. He'd thought to frighten Potter off, but he'd forgotten--or had he?--that Potter is almost never frightened off, and look where that demonstration had got him. Months later and still keeping the wizarding world's biggest secret and betraying its trust.

He still doesn't feel quite comfortable with all that overt need directed at him. When he apparates on the beach, Potter is outside already and his instinct is to back away, but then Potter is unbuttoning the cuffs at Snape's wrists to slide his fingers against rarely-exposed forearms, or breathing in the close damp air from the crease between arm and torso, touching his tongue to drops of precome on the tip of his cock, out in the open air, unceremoniously on the floor or against the door, or sometimes even twined together on the bed wrapped in sheets that Potter can barely feel, and he is gripping or scratching or biting Potter till he bruises and bleeds and they're ignoring Hedwig's ululating distress. The way Potter wants to be touched, and all the time Snape is touching Potter, Potter is talking, talking in constricted whispers and grunts, running commentary left over from their first days together as Secret and Keeper, before Snape ever dreamed that one day he'd be fucking Potter (fucking him!). He says _I can taste the sea on you_ as he licks the line of Snape's jaw, _feels like ants crawling over my hands_ as he runs them palm-up over the hair on Snape's legs without quite contacting the skin, and Snape doesn't know whether Potter is even aware of the words. And when Snape thrusts into him, so much friction it's painful for both of them, Harry arches his back, says desperately _I can feel you oh God it's good it's so good_ and Severus knows he means it, that this is good enough without even coming. All that hostility poured into one receptive vessel. Close, so close, always touching, even after.

Harry is his biggest secret, but he has another: with every step he takes away from the apparition site on the shore, every step he takes away from his life at Hogwarts, the tension eases a little, and by the time Harry's arms come around him, he can hardly remember how to be angry at all, except as far as Harry demands it of him.

:::

And then back to Hogwarts, back, the life he abandons every week and gives over to Harry along with the latest Hogwarts gossip. By the time he's standing at the front gates of the school his tension has returned twofold, and what he does when he returns is deliver news of Harry in exchange for what he's taken from them all. _He's well_ , he says, he sends his love, and that's all he can say without the strings of Fidelius straining tighter around his chest, or is that guilt? He can hardly tell any more, but to ease them, he sits in the meetings with Minverva and Black and Lupin and the rest, and thinks, _I am fucking him, fucking your boy, you think he belongs to you but he doesn't, you think he can't wait to see you again but he only reaches for the letters so he can free my hands_. And gradually the magical vise (or the guilt) loosens and the tension is just ordinary anger, ordinary at least for a life that sees little pleasure except in vindication. He settles back into his routine, and it's only the next week, when he steps up to the cottage to meet Potter with the seagulls screaming overhead, that he can listen to Harry and say only his name in return, as though he's not capable of saying anything else, and he's only grateful that if you whisper Harry, it sounds like more like a sigh than a word.

And sometimes he likes to think, as the post-apparition tingle evaporates from his skin and he and he watches Harry walking out from the cottage doorway to meet him, that if he were ever to fall asleep here, he would not dream.


End file.
